Lewis Hamilton said it was “incredibly special” to take his first pole position for the Monaco Grand Prix at his ninth attempt.
“It’s been a long, long time,” said Hamilton. “I can’t express to you just how happy I am.”
Hamilton said he had suffered a number of setbacks during qualifying and was pleased to have got on top of them. “It wasn’t the easiest session – I had a lot of things that kind of, were easy [to] kind of throw you off the rhythm, and which I did, I didn’t have the rhythm until the last two laps.”
“I was really happy with it. Coming across the line just hoping for once that you’ve got it. This is incredibly special for me and for my guys who’s worked incredibly hard this weekend.”
“It’s difficult to express just how difficult this track is,” he added. “It’s important to get into a rhythm and it’s really important to continue to improve.”
“It’s like climbing a ladder, every time you’ve got to be taking one step and if you slide back down it’s sometimes harder to get back up. So in our session we had some problems with tyres and we had some problems with some wing and traffic. So it wasn’t easy.”
“It makes it even more special because normally if you just back-to-back good laps, good laps, good laps, you can expect it. But we had some really bad laps, didn’t get the quickest laps in Q1 or Q2. It was great, I’m really happy.”
“Nothing was able to get in my way today,” said Hamilton. “I’m just sitting here thinking about all the previous years and thinks that kind of got away and wasn’t good enough, whatever it may be. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”
“I think 2006 in GP2 was the last time I started on pole here. So a very special day and at the end just a big thank you to the team. The performance we have in our car is outstanding. The guys have been perfect all weekend, I hope we can get the result tomorrow.”
Dom (@3dom)
23rd May 2015, 15:20
Finally a pole for lewis, plenty of times where pole was within his capability but often strategy (often waiting too long set a lap) prevented him from doing a lap as quick as he could. Today the strategy was, don’t mess about just get a run in early and it paid off
anonymouscoward (@anonymouscoward)
23rd May 2015, 16:14
I am so glad those qualifying blunders are behind him. I used to sit screaming at the tv all of the times at mclaren when they were getting it wrong and knew they were about to throw it away by waiting.
Dom (@3dom)
23rd May 2015, 18:40
Me too @anonymouscoward
I know that sometimes it’s easy to see something from the armchair but some of those blunders could quite easily be seen developing and really should have been avoided. Today was really refreshing
anonymouscoward (@anonymouscoward)
24th May 2015, 16:02
@3dom I take that back.
Dom (@3dom)
24th May 2015, 16:55
@anonymouscoward this is probably the biggest F1 blunder I’ve ever seen
Eggry (@eggry)
23rd May 2015, 16:55
I can’t believe this is the first time.
Keamo
23rd May 2015, 18:05
Well done Lewis. Now go get that win tomorrow.
kpcart
24th May 2015, 7:53
still a fair way to improve for Lewis at monaco if he wants to be the next Senna.